Seagate turns lasers loose on magnetic drives

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 24 Mar 2009 at 10:19

Seagate claims to have discovered a new way of greatly increasing the capacity of magnetic drives.

Magnetic drives are swiftly hitting the ceiling of their storage capacity, with solid-state drives widely expected to become the standard over the next five years. However, Seagate may have found a way to halt the coronation, according to a report in Technology Review

The company's touting a new technology called "heat-assisted magnetic recording" which it claims will increase the density of magnetic drives by up to 50 times.

Hard drives are made up of spinning platters coated in magnetic grains, on to which information is recorded by flipping the magnetisation of the grain so that it either faces up or down, representing a 1 or a 0.

The greater the density the smaller these grains become, making them increasingly unstable.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording apparently overcomes this by blasting the magnetic regions of a disk with heat. This makes even the smaller grains easier to flip, greatly increasing the overall capacity of a standard drive.

The trick comes in accurately focusing a laser beam on an individual grain - a space narrower than 100 nanometers in diameter. According to Seagate, this has required it to develop an entirely new type of optic.

Seagate expects the technology to make an appearance in commercial drives in the next couple of years.